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I work at Google, but this is my personal website. The views expressed on this site are my own and not necessarily those of my employer. Comments left on this blog are only representative of those who left them.

Chocolate chip cookies

I’ve been cooking for some time now, but I’ve never really tried baking anything from scratch—until now. In the latest episode of my food preparation show, I bake chocolate chip cookies with a lot of help from two special guests.

As usual, post production took a while. We baked the cookies over a month ago, and some of you who I work with may remember me bringing in some of the cookies to share. The long production time was due to a few reasons: I’m lazy, it’s the longest episode so far, and this was my first video I edited with Final Cut Pro X. You may have heard that it’s not getting a great reception. I was optimistic at first, thinking that the bad reviews were just based on nitpicks or missing features that I don’t rely on. And when I first started (after purchasing and installing a new graphics card), everything seemed fine. It was actually pretty easy to do rough cuts. However, it was hard to pick up any momentum as the app kept crashing. Final Cut has come a long way over the years in terms of stability, and it’s sad to see it crashing and being buggy again. I don’t know if there was an update though, because recently it has been better behaved. And then beyond the crashing, I found even the simplest edits to be confusing. I simply could not figure out how to accomplish certain basic tasks, like having the music overlap with the video track. I was eventually able to figure most things out after reading the documentation, but the interface is so different than the previous versions of the program (I couldn’t even use the old keyboard shortcuts to enable my preferred tools), that it was really frustrating to feel like I was starting over. If I was a real video editor, one of those keyboard ninjas who can edit live while others watch from the editing room couch, I’m sure the differences would have been even more dramatic. So while I do appreciate and agree with many of the new concepts introduced in this new version, and I am learning where all of the controls have moved to, it’s certainly going to take some getting used to. Despite the rough start, things are getting better, I’m still optimistic, and I will be editing additional projects on Final Cut Pro X soon.